


Everything is Blue

by sugarboat



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Brief tentacles, F/M, Light Spanking, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 20:41:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7948348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarboat/pseuds/sugarboat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emily Kaldwin makes her choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything is Blue

“Emily Kaldwin.” It was a statement of fact, and nothing more. For once, her name was said without affection or reverence, without ridicule or disgust. It was punctuated with the sharp sound of flesh meeting flesh, his palm striking against the smooth, pale curve of her buttocks. 

She quivered and made a sound – the exact nature of the noise muffled by the gag in her mouth. Her skin, where struck, felt hot to the touch, and he pressed his hand against its image. The empress squirmed in her bindings.

“You’ve had an empire gifted to you -” He slapped her again, on the other cheek this time. “Dropped into your lap like it was a party favor.” Rage radiated off of her, and the Outsider knew he had plucked a raw nerve. He always knew which notes to play. 

Black tendrils were twined around her long limbs and torso, forcing her body into a bent position. They supported her weight, though pulled at her to keep her taut and tense. She struggled against them, fighting the inexplicable feeling that they were trying to drag her down, down into the swirling void - trying to pull apart the very things that made Emily Kaldwin, Emily Kaldwin. 

“And twice now, you’ve lost it.” Disdain leaked into his voice, tainting the words. The sound rang out again, and it should echo back to them, but the void swallowed all sound – swallowed everything. The Outsider gently traced the red marks on her flesh, feeling her human emotions washing over him like the morning waves. The coils wound around her made a stark contrast. What’s black and white and red all over? The answer in Dunwall had become, The Lord Protector.

“Allowing yourself to be pulled by the ebb and flow of someone else’s whims.” He struck her again. “Allowing them to take everything you have.” He struck her again. The tendrils wrenched harder on her limbs. “Allowing your city to be drowned in blood, and purged by fire.” He struck her again.

She made a desperate noise low in her throat, and Emily was like an open book. There was a burning flame inside of her, anger and passion, humiliation and desire, fear and longing. He was suddenly close to her face, his breath whispering against her ear. “Tell me, did you ever really grow up?

“You’ve had your choices spoon-fed to you, pre-chewed, your whole life.” He pushed her suddenly and the tendrils dissipated back into the nothingness from which they originated. She sprawled onto the ground, clothed again. She whipped around, and was unsurprised to see her - tormentor? Captor? – Outsider vanished. The Void yawned out all around her, pulsing with the heartbeat of some great unknown leviathan.

Emily didn’t bother to speak. Any thoughts she had on the matter were already known to anyone who might be around to hear. She slowly stood, feeling the sting of his hands still on her backside, and the answering heat in her loins. Damn the Outsider, and curse him to the Abbey’s mercy. Pouting and wishing ill on a potentially immortal being wasn’t going to solve her issues.

It had been many long – peaceful – years since she had last been cast into the Void in her dreams. Back in those days, it had always played out the same. She would be running through the Tower gardens, barely even noticing that the cobalt sky had darkened and distorted to the nightmare blue of this inbetween world. Laughing and giggling, until she turned a corner and ran into Havelock. When she would turn around to run, the world would be gone, and she would be facing a precipice she knew ended in a long fall and a rocky shore.

She would scream, she would fall, and the Outsider, floating in the sky before her, would laugh, and she would wake covered in sweat. It had repeated for weeks. Weeks, in which she would remember, and try to change the outcome. Weeks, in which she must have failed over a hundred times. Eventually the Outsider had receded, drawing back like low tide. Emily Kaldwin should have been more prepared for the day he came surging back. 

Jumping off the edge and into the Void would accomplish nothing, except grant her the pain of death without the respite. She turned around, and was only incrementally surprised to see that where before there had been nothingness, a dark corridor now stretched before her. It reminded her of the Tower – home, safety – but it wasn’t a piece taken directly from the building. Cautiously, she approached it.

“We can’t always choose our battles, can we, Empress?” She didn’t bother to look around for him, straining to hear beyond his voice, to hear if there was some threat lurking beyond the open doorways scattered along the walls. Of course, there was nothing, but that didn’t mean anything. The Outsider could make howling animals silent here. “No, sometimes someone – or something – sets us on a path we can’t avoid; a path we can’t even see.”

Heart in her throat, she peered into the first room. It was a frozen scene, of the Whalers handing a younger her over to Hiram Burrows. The killers of her mother, gifting her to the man who orchestrated it all. She walked on, boots thudding against the water-warped wood beneath her feet. The next room showed little Emily on the floor of the Golden Cat, drawing a unicorn. A rueful smile came to the Empress; her drawings hadn’t looked like that in a long time.

Against what was probably her better judgment, she entered the room. There was a lamp next to her younger self, spilling light across the white-laced princess. It had begun flickering when she came inside, and the closer she came to the focal point of this setting, the dimmer the light grew. The drawings she had pinned to the walls slowly twisted, the golden cat she had drawn becoming skeletal and growing sharp claws and long teeth. 

Little Emily’s eyes were dripping blood onto her current canvas, which had turned into a horse prancing on the swollen bodies of plague victims. She backed away slowly, but the scene stayed corrupted, her presence having irrevocably decayed something. As she stumbled into the hallway, a door suddenly swung shut in her face, locking her away from the girl in her memories.

Belatedly, she realized her heart was pounding. Foolishness. Yet the next room she came across – her room in the broken tower, Callista cradling a book in her arms – Emily hesitated before, and then walked past. She could hear the Outside’s insidious laughter, like spilled wine seeping across white carpeting. Her fists clenched and her jaw ached, but she left the other rooms in her personal hallway untouched.

The hallway ended abruptly, the closed space opening to the expansive wasteland of the Void. In the distance, she could see floating islands and dying whales, their spilled entrails swirling around their behemoth forms. A creaking sound of metal hinges alerted her to a door opening behind her. Emily whirled around, hands balled into fists, but nothing rushed out to greet her. She walked back to the only door that she had seen, noticing that all the rooms she had passed before – her coronation, her first ball as empress, her lessons – were empty.

She came to the Golden Cat room. As she had suspected, the door was hanging open. Loathe as she was to see the stained figure of herself, she knew that playing along was only way to get out of the game. It was a lesson that was reinforced every day of her waking life. Instead of being entrenched in the wretched attic again, she found herself in her mother’s office. It looked just as it had when the empress had been alive. The walls were hidden behind ceiling-high bookcases, rows upon rows of tomes that Emily was now at least passingly familiar with. 

Even tiny details she had forgotten about were here, paintings hanging on the open spaces and statuettes that had been lost to time. And towards the back of the room, situated around the great, dark desk, was the empress herself and her dead Spymaster. Emily stared hard at her mother. It looked as though the two were in a heated discussion. All she could think was, is this the point he decided to kill my mother?

There was a deep, splintering sound and cracks appeared along the ground, snaking up the walls and running across the ceiling. The back half of the office seemed to fall off, stone and brick and wood separating and floating apart. She took an involuntary step backwards, and bumped into one of the statuettes was that suddenly hanging gently in the air. When she turned around to knock it away, the Outsider was there to greet her. He caught her arm mid-swing.

“As much as you enjoyed hiding from your tutors in your youth, you nevertheless have always possessed a sharp mind.” He put his hand on her shoulder, a cruel smirk painting his face at her subtle flinch. Gently, so gently, as if she was a bird or wounded animal, he guided her to face Jessamine again. “So, I’m sure you’ve already figured out just which moment in history you’re witnessing.”

“Did you appear before him, too, crooning about changing the lives of thousands of people?” Her tone was biting and acidic, but the Outsider just kept smiling. “Of course not, plotting the murder of an empress is so mundane, so boring-” His laughter cut her off.

“Regime changes are nothing I haven’t seen before, and nothing that won’t happen a hundred times more. It is a topic you should be an expert on by now.” Emily frowned, studying the face of her mother. “People tell you you look like her. In the streets, they say you inherited her appearance, but not her compassion.” His arm looped around her shoulders. “Though in the pubs they still drink to your name and debate your heritage.”

She pursed her lips. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to choose.” He had dissipated and reformed in front of her, crossing his arms over his chest. “We don't choose our battles, but we decide which weapons we bring to the fight.” He made a sweeping gesture with one arm.

“I don’t have a lot of options available to me, unlike Corvo, I’m not-”

“Locked in a prison cell, awaiting an executioner’s axe to end your torture?” He shrugged. “You can’t alter the path you’ve been set upon, but you can choose how you venture down its route. There are always options.” With that, his body melted away again, slinking back into the nothing he called home.

Emily sighed, moving past her still-life mother and sitting at the edge of the abyss, her feet dangling off the side. They kicked in the air, as they’d done when she first sat on the throne. She was no stranger to perseverance, or to finding hidden solutions and compromises. The Outsider seemed to hold no regard for the sacrifices she had made, the diplomacy she’d had to employ. As if she hadn’t had to scramble and clutch to achieve her position in the world.

Time seemed to be more of a suggestion rather than a rule in the Void, but she figured he wasn’t going to keep her much longer. If there was something she was supposed to prove or learn, it wasn’t happening here. She stood and took one last look at her mother. Jessamine’s still form was now leaking blood, her clothes wet and a deep red puddle forming beneath her. The rest of the room had drifted away while she wasn’t paying attention, and the three of them were now occupying nothing more than a small island.

“If this is your way of showing me options, you’re making a mess of it,” she murmured, more to herself than to the Outsider. She glanced around but there seemed to be nothing near to them. One of the bookcases was still within view, its glass doors open and its contents spilling into the air. She grimaced, backing up and taking a running jump towards the furniture. She landed roughly.

From this vantage point, she could see a trail of islands leading upwards. Unwilling to go back, she gather herself and jumped again, landing on cobbled streets. She kept going, leaping from one platform to the next, pieces of Dunwall revolving to haunt her. Past, present, it all blurred together, streets splattered with blood at one moment and insidiously empty the next. The distances between each grew longer and longer, so she would heave with exertion after each leap. 

Jessamine’s island always seemed to be her peripheral vision. As sweat dripped from her brow, the temptation grew and grew, to turn around, to hide beneath the great desk and wait for Corvo to come find her. But she suddenly became aware, there was only one island left before her. She couldn’t make out the details of the figuring standing atop it, and she knew with a plummeting sensation that there was no way she could reach it.

She felt like screaming, like tearing out her hair. Was all this just to show her how meaningless her struggles were? As if the Outsider needed to tell her. She couldn’t tell if his laughter was in her head or in the Void, or if the distinction even mattered anymore. It was anger and desperation that pushed her to jump, a mirror of her younger self jumping off the precipice to the sound of ocean waves. Her hands stretched out, grasping for things that were always just out of reach.

As her momentum ran out and Emily began her descent, a scream built in her throat, and a black tendril suddenly coiled around her left arm. She instinctively tried to jerk out and away from it, but it had attached itself firmly to her forearm. Another tendril shot out from it, following by multiple, smaller coils winding around it, forming what looked like a rope. Its far end attached to a piece of the island, and just as quickly shortened, jerking her along with it.

The impact knocked the wind out of her, but she still had the sense – or perhaps just the reflexes – to duck into a roll. It ended with her once again face down on the floor. She opened her eyes and looked up, into the eyeless face of a Weeper. Gagging, she scrambled away. The corpse was only one of many, not all of them, or even most of them, plague victims. Guards and Overseers, citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And above them all, a silhouetted figure, whose identity she was suddenly certain of.

Emily Kaldwin shakily got to her feet, shuffling backwards until she was an arm’s length away from the legacy Corvo had gifted the people of Dunwall. She stalked around the mountain, eyes searching for movement in the crowd. She only looked up when we she was at the front of the pile, craning her neck to stare at the familiar masked figure. At his side was a throne, not made of fine marble but of singing whalebone, like the charms he always carried.

She turned her back on him, unsurprised to see her mother’s island had drifted right behind her again, following her like a well-trained hound. The scene looked as though it had shifted, now displaying the gazebo where the empress had been struck down. The past had her surrounded, corralled her and choked her. Death had made itself her constant companion. Next to her mother’s body was her throne, a still beating heart thumping at its feet.

Emily sneered, her eyes calculating and unchanging. A choice, was it? A soft part of her heart, the part she’d buried long ago, urged her to jump one last time. Her mother needed her, was waiting for her. Her mother could protect her, shelter her from harm. Her mother was dead.

A sudden wind ruffled her hair, bringing with it the sound of buzzing flies and the sickly sweet stench of decay. All familiar sensations from the streets of Dunwall. She turned her back on her mother’s throne, and began to climb up the path Corvo had so thoughtfully prepared for her. Beneath her grasp, diseased flesh slid off of bone.

Laughter, deep and melodious, rang around her. Her filth covered hand seized the jagged edge of the singing throne. Grunting with effort, she hauled herself up, settling into its unyielding grasp. The back of her hand burned, like a thousand needle point pricks, a million stinging insects. Perched at the top of the mass grave, she could see far out into the void, see how the blacks and blues and sparks of white melded and swirled together towards some infinite end.

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, felt a cool hand press against her throat. Somehow, she knew when she opened them again, she’d be back in her grand room, warm and comfortable. Cold breath ghosted against her face.

“Wisely chosen, Empress.” Emily Kaldwin grinned into the darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before we knew a lot about the sequel, and have been sitting on it since.


End file.
